U.S. Says Italy Must Do More to Fight Mafia, WikiLeaks Shows

Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's prime minister, adjusts his tie as he arrives for the inauguration of a clinic in San Donato near Milan, Italy, May 19, 2009. Photographer: Giuseppe Aresu/Bloomberg News

Jan. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Italy’s politicians and Catholic
Church are not doing enough to fight the Sicilian Mafia and the
country’s other crime groups, according to a classified U.S.
diplomatic cable posted by the website WikiLeaks.

“Politicians are not too focused on these issues,” the
U.S. general counsel in Naples, J. Patrick Truhn, said in a
cable sent on June 6, 2008, according to the leaked document.
“At the national level it is generally referred to, if at all,
as a ‘southern’ issue, although it affects the entire country.”

Truhn said “organized crime was barely mentioned” in that
year’s election campaign, won by Prime Minister Silvio
Berlusconi. “The Italian Catholic Church has often come under
fire for not taking a stronger public stance against organized
crime,” he also said, according to the cable.

The Italian economy, Europe’s fourth biggest, shrank 5.1
percent in 2009 as the country experienced its deepest slump
since World War II. Organized-crime groups boosted their revenue
by 4 percent to 135 billion euros ($174.6 billion) in the same
year, according to estimates from Rome-based anti-racketeering
group SOS Impresa.

“Although law enforcement, business associations,
citizens’ groups” are “demonstrating promising engagement in
fighting organized crime, the same cannot be said of Italy’s
politicians, particularly at the national level,” Truhn said.

The U.S. has a “significant stake in the fight against
organized crime in Italy,” he said, adding that Italian crime
syndicates “support terrorist groups in Colombia and Central
Asia through drug trafficking” and violate intellectual-property rights of U.S. businesses and artists.

Italy’s mafia is a criminal threat in the United States,
particularly in the Northeast, Deputy Attorney General Mark
Filip told reporters at the U.S. Embassy in Rome in May 2008.